Analysis and Its Function in the Platonic Tradition

16 September 2024

Analysis and Its Function in the Platonic Tradition

I have been reading Plotinus the Platonist by David J. Yount.  In the past I have used Yount’s books as reference books, meaning that I dove into them here and there, depending on the particular subject I was interested in.  This time I intend to read his books from cover to cover.  The second book is Plato and Plotinus on Mysticism, Epistemology, and Ethics.  They aren’t huge volumes, but they contain a huge amount of information.

I just finished Chapter 1 of Plotinus the Platonist which Yount refers to as containing his most ‘controversial claims.’  Yount’s approach is to state his understanding of a particular matter of interpretation and then briefly quote scholars who oppose his perspective.  Yount then attempts to counter the scholars who disagree with him.  This makes for a complex texture though I didn’t find it forbidding; partly, I think, this is because Yount doesn’t go off on tangents, which is sometimes a temptation in philosophical writing.

This approach also introduces the reader to the multitude of contemporary interpretations regarding Plato, Plotinus, and the relationship between them.  There is a wide range of such interpretations.  I was aware of this from reading a lot of commentaries on Phaedo when I was posting here about that Dialogue.  But Yount covers a lot more views and topics.

This got me thinking about the (inherent?) instability of these kinds of analyses.  I mean that there never seems to be a conclusion that is reached or a kind of settling down to a general agreement.  Primarily this is due to our living in the third level, or hypostasis, that is to say the material world, which is distinctively marked by differentiation and an inability to achieve unity.  Secondarily, this is due to the way modern philosophy views itself as part of the heritage of analytic philosophy which emerged in the early 20th century.  Analytic philosophy is all about splitting concepts, winning arguments by redefining concepts, creating sub-categories, simply for the sake of doing so.  In this way the analytic tradition sometimes resembles the Gnosticism that Plotinus critiqued because both traditions very much enjoy multiplying concepts beyond necessity.  

This situation, the multitude of interpretations on many issues of Platonic Philosophy that are all vying for acceptance, also got me thinking about what is the function of analysis in Platonic philosophy.  Platonism is a highly intellectual tradition and it has generated some of the greatest intellects of history from Aristotle to Whitehead.  But there is analysis, and then there is ‘analysis.’  Here are a few comments about this:

1.  I think one way of looking at this kind of analysis is to compare it to music theory.  Music theory looks at a piece of music and seeks to point out the underlying structures that are below the surface and hold the music together.  But different analyses will highlight different aspects of the same music.  In a similar way, different analyses of Platonic thought will highlight different aspects of the Platonic tradition.

2.  In some cases, it seems to me that some of these analyses are mere ‘mental fabrications’ or ‘speculations’ which are a kind of churning of the intellect.  Some of them do not seem to me to lead to clarity or insight; but that might be because I don’t understand what, in these cases, is being advocated.  As I have previously mentioned, I ran into these kinds of mental fabrications when I studied Buddhism.  In some ways they are attractive, but they don’t seem to have any real impact on practice.  That is to say whether or not I agree with one of these ‘tenet systems’ does not change or deepen my meditation or my ability to embody Buddhist ethics.  In that sense, they are disconnected from the life of a Buddhist practitioner.  I think the same can be said of some of the contemporary analyses of Platonism.

3.  This tendency to over-analyze and over-interpret Platonism appears to me to run counter to the purpose of experiencing Nous, or the second hypostasis, or the second level of reality. This level is usually referred to as ‘Intellect,’ sometimes ‘Intellectual Principle’ but I think that what the second level is about differs from the kinds of analyses I am expressing skepticism about.  Nous is a realm of unities and includes such unities as numbers, being, and the forms.  The experience of Nous brings us closer to the One which is pure unity and absence of differentiation.  When Nous is referred to as intellect, in a traditional Platonic context that means using the mind to uncover unity where unity was not previously accessible or known.  This is why devices like allegory, metaphor, simile, and other ‘comparisons’ of this kind are used in Platonism; because these devices are excellent for pointing to hidden unities.  But this way of approaching Platonic analysis is nearly the opposite of analysis that seeks to divide, separate, and is focused on the multiplication of mind-created entities.

4.  What Yount does in his two books is to point out what unites Plato and Plotinus rather than what separates them.  And by implication Yount is pointing to what unites the Platonic tradition as a whole.  This was how Plato and Plotinus were understood for over 1,000 years.  I think it is a good thing to return to that perspective.